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Related papers: Batch Policy Learning under Constraints

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Off-policy evaluation (OPE) and off-policy learning (OPL) are foundational for decision-making in offline contextual bandits. Recent advances in OPL primarily optimize OPE estimators with improved statistical properties, assuming that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-04 Imad Aouali , Otmane Sakhi

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the method that attempts to estimate the performance of decision making policies using historical data generated by different policies without conducting costly online A/B tests. Accurate OPE is essential in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-20 Yuta Saito , Takuma Udagawa , Kei Tateno

Policy constraint methods to offline reinforcement learning (RL) typically utilize parameterization or regularization that constrains the policy to perform actions within the support set of the behavior policy. The elaborative designs of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Jialong Wu , Haixu Wu , Zihan Qiu , Jianmin Wang , Mingsheng Long

The training of autonomous agents often requires expensive and unsafe trial-and-error interactions with the environment. Nowadays several data sets containing recorded experiences of intelligent agents performing various tasks, spanning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Giorgio Angelotti , Nicolas Drougard , Caroline Ponzoni Carvalho Chanel

Offline reinforcement learning provides a viable approach to obtain advanced control strategies for dynamical systems, in particular when direct interaction with the environment is not available. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Marc Weber , Phillip Swazinna , Daniel Hein , Steffen Udluft , Volkmar Sterzing

Contextual bandit algorithms are ubiquitous tools for active sequential experimentation in healthcare and the tech industry. They involve online learning algorithms that adaptively learn policies over time to map observed contexts $X_t$ to…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-19 Ian Waudby-Smith , Lili Wu , Aaditya Ramdas , Nikos Karampatziakis , Paul Mineiro

Off-Policy evaluation (OPE) is concerned with evaluating a new target policy using offline data generated by a potentially different behavior policy. It is critical in a number of sequential decision making problems ranging from healthcare…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-02 Yang Xu , Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Lan Wang , Rui Song

Offline reinforcement learning agents seek optimal policies from fixed data sets. With environmental interaction prohibited, agents face significant challenges in preventing errors in value estimates from compounding and subsequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Alex Beeson , Giovanni Montana

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

Off-policy estimation (OPE) methods enable unbiased offline evaluation of recommender systems, directly estimating the online reward some target policy would have obtained, from offline data and with statistical guarantees. The theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-12 Olivier Jeunen

The goal of offline reinforcement learning is to learn a policy from a fixed dataset, without further interactions with the environment. This setting will be an increasingly more important paradigm for real-world applications of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Wenxuan Zhou , Sujay Bajracharya , David Held

In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-20 Zhengyuan Zhou , Susan Athey , Stefan Wager

This work aims to study off-policy evaluation (OPE) under scenarios where two key reinforcement learning (RL) assumptions -- temporal stationarity and individual homogeneity are both violated. To handle the ``double inhomogeneities", we…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-20 Zeyu Bian , Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Lan Wang

Monotonic policy improvement and off-policy learning are two main desirable properties for reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper, by lower bounding the performance difference of two policies, we show that the monotonic policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-02 Ryo Iwaki , Minoru Asada

The ability to learn from large batches of autonomously collected data for policy improvement -- a paradigm we refer to as batch online reinforcement learning -- holds the promise of enabling truly scalable robot learning by significantly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Perry Dong , Suvir Mirchandani , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn

Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Davide Mambelli , Stephan Bongers , Onno Zoeter , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Frans A. Oliehoek

Policy learning algorithms are widely used in areas such as personalized medicine and advertising to develop individualized treatment regimes. However, most methods force a decision even when predictions are uncertain, which is risky in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Ayush Sawarni , Jikai Jin , Justin Whitehouse , Vasilis Syrgkanis

The performance of reinforcement learning depends upon designing an appropriate action space, where the effect of each action is measurable, yet, granular enough to permit flexible behavior. So far, this process involved non-trivial user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Edoardo Cetin , Oya Celiktutan

Policy constraint methods in offline reinforcement learning employ additional regularization techniques to constrain the discrepancy between the learned policy and the offline dataset. However, these methods tend to result in overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Shirong Liu , Chenjia Bai , Zixian Guo , Hao Zhang , Gaurav Sharma , Yang Liu

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandits has seen rapid adoption in real-world systems, since it enables offline evaluation of new policies using only historic log data. Unfortunately, when the number of actions is large, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Yuta Saito , Thorsten Joachims